Category: Not A Committee

Last February, Claudia Gray, author of Lost Stars and the imminent (and hotly anticipated) Bloodline, dropped a bomb into the Star Wars shipping community when she declared her affection for Reylo—in other words, the notion of a romance between Rey and Kylo Ren. While Reylo is a divisive prospect for a number of reasons, in particular the characters’ potential family ties and the overtones of sexual assault in Kylo’s mental torture of Rey in The Force Awakens, the reactions of many of her fans on social media was, well, staggering to me.

While likely a small number in the grand scheme of things, numerous people were appalled, declaring they no longer planned to purchase Bloodline, and even attacking Gray’s character. She spent the next day or so tweeting at length on the subject, responding generally and to several specific individuals, and to my mind, made a lot of great points both on Reylo and on shipping in general.

To be clear, I can’t get my head around Reylo myself. Nor am I particularly into Kylux ^[1]Kylo and Hux or Stormpilot ^[2]Finn and Poe (though Poe is one hundred percent not straight). But I have latched onto certain Star Wars couples over the years, both actual (Tycho and Winter) and prospective (Jacen and Danni Quee), and one thing I do know from experience is that you can’t always explain what appeals to you and why. Like Grey said, it’s complex stuff full of emotional baggage from real life—that’s why people can feel so strongly about it. But you certainly can’t draw a straight line from somebody’s ship to their real character or values; what’s therapeutic for one person can be triggering for someone else. Two people with similar backgrounds can have completely opposite reactions to, well, any story beat or overtone, romantic or otherwise. What I love the most about Star Wars is how one thing can attract such a huge amount of fans for so many varied reasons, and a ship is a microcosm of that—saying “Reylo fans condone abuse” is like saying Han Solo fans condone drug running. Read More

Mike: When I was first acquainting myself with the Star Wars franchise in the late nineties, the volume of Expanded Universe material I felt it necessary to catch up on was already quite daunting—most of a decade’s worth of novels and comics were already out there, and more were arriving all the time. Luckily, one huge batch of content was pretty widely regarded as not worth my time: the original 107-issue Marvel Star Wars comic series. Having run from 1977 to 1986, it was more than a decade out of print by the time I laid eyes on A New Hope, and to say the stories had fallen out of fashion during the peak of the Bantam era would be an understatement. So for a long time, I didn’t see a reason to go anywhere near them.

Much later, well after the prequels were over, I finally decided to give them a go. It took two tries—first in 2009 and again in 2013 after Episode VII had been announced—but I eventually worked my way through the whole series. I got to experience firsthand things I’d been aware of in some cases only by rough description (Jaxxon, Arbra, Valance the Hunter) and in other cases by their appearances in more recent EU (Zeltrons, Nagai, and of course Lumiya). Reading almost ten years’ worth of comics over a (cumulative) span of several months, the series’s evolving tone was incredibly pronounced, from the borderline slapstick of the earliest stories to the relative seriousness of the Kiro and Tay Vanis storylines to, near the end, a tenuous balance between the two extremes as the Hiromi weaseled their way into the Nagai/Tof conflict. Read More

Mike: I’ll say this much: the Academy Awards are exciting. Much like the Super Bowl, undoubtedly the dominant yearly cultural event in modern American life, unless you make a conscious effort to tune them out entirely, it’s hard to simply have them on in the background and not get sucked in. They may not always be a good show, but they’re an exhaustively elaborate show, and like the live TV musicals that have recently become a holiday tradition, it’s fascinating to watch so many shiny and well-known moving pieces swirl around in an environment where pretty much anything can happen.

They’re so fascinating, and so elaborate, that it can be easy to lose sight of how little it really means. Popular art and culture are extremely important—we wouldn’t have written hundreds of thousands of words on this very site if we didn’t think so—and winning an Oscar certainly means a lot to any individual lucky enough to do so, but as this year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy highlighted, to win an Oscar is at best a narrowly-defined victory. And it’s certainly not an absolute guarantee of something’s value, any more than to lose one guarantees a lack thereof.

So amidst my own feverish live-tweeting Sunday night, it was disheartening to see a number of Star Wars fans—though, I speculate, a comfortable minority—express shock and even rage as The Force Awakens lost one, then another, and eventually all five of its nominated categories. Whatever you think of Mad Max: Fury Road or Ex Machina or The Hateful Eight, they’re each singular films with nothing near the weight of the Star Wars franchise behind them, and personally I can’t help but root for spunky underdogs. Read More

Let’s get this out of the way: even many detractors of The Force Awakens concede that Rey is the wonderful, nuanced female Star Wars lead we’ve always wanted but never dared to dream we would get. That was the case from the moment she popped up on our movie screens, and it’s enormously unlikely that any new information regarding her origins would change that. Her being a Skywalker would not diminish her value any more than Darth Vader being a Skywalker diminished Luke’s.

That said, I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun to guess! Speaking for myself, it all comes down to the execution; I can see a version of Rey Skywalker that I love just as easily as I can see one I hate, and that applies to all the possibilities. There’s more than enough evidence to go around (there’s even a spreadsheet out there, because of course there is) and keep us guessing and debating for the next eighteen months—at least!—so I wanted to see where we at ETE stand right now. Think of this as a snapshot more than battle lines; I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of our minds are changed as the months go by. Mine has already.

Speaking of which, I’ll be back at the end with my own totally batshit theory, because that’s how I roll, but where are you guys leaning right now? What’s the most important piece of evidence as you see it—or is it more your personal hopes than an objective analysis? Read More

Now that we’ve all had well over a month to digest the Force Friday releases, some big-picture reactions are taking shape. Recently Jay elaborated on how the Servants of the Empire series tells us a great deal about the canon Empire and why it falls; maybe even more than it set out to. Before that, Sarah discussed how my early fears may have been unfounded, and that the earliest rounds of The Force Awakens merchandise appear to be far more progressive and gender-inclusive than similar items from that other Disney wunderkind, Marvel.

Another thing that’s been bouncing around my head has proven to be a little harder to talk about; but the truth of it remains: it seems to me that Disney-Lucasfilm Press—the in-house publishing division that has released numerous middle-grade books like the Servants series and the “young adult” Lost Stars—is officially running circles around Del Rey. Some might say that producing books for younger readers (even dozens of them) is an easier job than producing “adult” novels Del Rey-style. I don’t particularly think that’s true, but even setting aside all the short stuff, Lost Stars is the equal of any adult novel in both length and maturity, and for many is simply the best novel—no qualifiers needed–of the new canon. Lost Stars is proof that Disney and Lucasfilm are capable of producing a full-length novel that deserves to stand alongside anything ever published by Del Rey, or Bantam before them; and they’re capable of doing it in-house.

Compared to a lot of other fans I know (including some who write for me), I’m a relative pushover when it comes to Star Wars books. It’s very rare that I emphatically dislike anything; when I was reviewing for TheForce.Net I almost never rated a book less than 3 / 4, because the GFFA is such a fun setting that I can usually enjoy even a disappointing book on some level. So none of this is to say that I think Del Rey’s output has sucked over the last year; not everything has been my cup of tea but I’d only describe Tarkin and Heir to the Jedi as remotely disappointing; Aftermath, and Chuck Wendig himself, was a rollicking breath of fresh air for Star Wars publishing, and John Jackson Miller is quite simply one of my favorite Star Wars writers ever and can do no wrong in my eyes. Read More